The result of the debate was speedied. -
Mairi (
talk) 18:48, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
reply
Mislabled when I created it. Falcon8765 ( talk) 07:58, 21 July 2009 (UTC) reply
The result of the debate was keep. -
Mairi (
talk) 01:41, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
reply
I see these tags all over the place, and they just seem pointless clutter to me. What is the audience?: People who read and edit these articles are interested in plants, and might have an interest in a particular family or genus; but I don't believe there are m/any editors out there who have a specific interest in trees (woody plants with a single trunk expressing apical dominance) as opposed to shrubs, vines, lianes, etcetera. We now have an excellent stub hierarchy for plant articles, with or without this particular stub type. In particular, every tree stub already has a taxon-specific stub-type. This was, I think, a reasonable stub type when it was created back in 2005; but in my opinion the plant stub hierarchy is so nicely developed now, and this particular stub type so lacking in a target audience, that eliminating it would be an improvement.
With respect to 2. and 4., tree-stub is not a general stub type in the sense of sitting at the base of a hierarchy of more specific stubs types into which tree stubs may be dispersed. There are only a few sub-types, and these are even more hideous than tree-stub—{{ Fabaceae-tree-stub}}, for example; if this were in category space it would be immediately and unceremoniously dumped per Wikipedia:Overcategorization#Trivial intersection. Certainly there is no audience for such an obscure topic. In practice what happens is the tree-stub category fills up and up and up. We add taxonomic stub types to these stubs, but the tree-stub tag itself cannot be dispersed because the sub-types don't exist. You may counter that the solution is to create the sub-types, but what would you create? More trivial intersections? There doesn't seem to be an coherent way to subdivide the topic.
So what we have is a stub type with no audience, and with no coherent method for breaking it into sub-types that would have an audience. And what bang do we get for our buck? The ability to tag taxon-vague articles with {{ tree-stub}}, which could be achieved just as well by redirecting it to {{ plant-stub}}; and a nice stub type for half a dozen "trees in general" articles. Hesperian 02:42, 3 July 2009 (UTC) reply